Patrick Butler is a senior Senior Research Associate at Virginia Tech. At Virginia Tech, he is a member of the Discovery Analytics Center, a university-wide effort that brings together researchers from computer science, statistics, mathematics, and electrical and computer engineering to tackle knowledge discovery problems in important areas of national interest, including intelligence analysis, sustainability, and electronic medical records. The main thrust of his research focuses on the IARPA funded EMBERS project that uses open source indicators such as tweets, news, blog, weather, etc to forecast population level events such as civil unrest, elections, and epidemics.
Patrick graduated with his PhD in Computer Science from Virginia tech in 2014 during which time he was awarded a SMART Fellowship. His dissertation was in the area of using knowledge discovery for intelligence analysis.